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November 2006

When I was a child in elementary school, we were taught that the big difference between us and The Soviets (later referred to as the Evil Empire) was that the soviets could drag you out of bed in the middle of the night and send you somewhere never to be seen again, whereas we of course had due process that entitled you to have an attorney and all kinds of wonderful, civilized things. Further, we were told, you weren't even free to LEAVE the Soviet Union. If you tried to defect, well, the KGB could take your family and throw them into a prison camp... never to be heard from again. And if you went there, you were watched by the KGB.

Without hammering on Guatanamo = The Gulag, and of course Ted Rall did the eulogy for the Bill of Rights, I'd like to note an article regarding what was, for me, the most absurd part of the whole thing - the concept of "defecting." Will we now have defections from the US?

Aside from the obvious October Surprise hopes and anxieties, I think the brouhaha over Kerry's statement is that it hit a bit too close to home. Buried in The antiwar GIs at Salon, is the single sentence:

Yet the silent resistance runs deep, Madden believes. "It is more than
anybody would ever admit," he explains. "A lot of people are in the
military for life, because of their economic situation. But their hearts are against the war."

... because of their economic situation.

And how, in the US, does the story go? If you get an education you get a good job. If you don't.... Well, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. In reality, while an education certainly is no guarantee, the fact is without one there are not a lot of alternatives.

Since, beginning with the Reagan 'trickle-down' voodoo-economics years, the gap has grown so remarkably between wealthy and those who aren't, there are plenty of desperate, hardworking poor in the US. When Kerry accidentally exhorted the crowd to do well in school or risk taking a life-threatening, futile, dangerous job it was the truth.